Revolutionaries for Hire.

• Author: McCRARY, DEANNA
• Position: Accounting firms can now recruit from dot-com sector - Industry Overview - Statistical Data Included

CPAs Capitalize on Dot-Com Demise

Less than a year ago,

San Francisco's streets south of Market, home to hundreds of dot-coms, were brimming with young, pierced-and-tattooed professionals swaggering to loft work spaces, soy lattes in hand, humming a tune along the lines of Queen's "We Are the Champions." The technology revolution had embraced Gen. X and Y by the tens of thousands and funneled their enthusiasm, entrepreneurial spirits and yes, naivete, into the most potentially gratifying--and riskiest--venture in U.S. business history: the dot-com. All the while, California's CPA recruiters bemoaned the difficult task of recruiting bright, young talent to a profession decidedly famous for NOT allowing you to bring your pet to work.

Oh, how the tables have turned.

Today when you walk through those streets, many of the java stops are gone and "for rent" has replaced "IPO" as the mantra of the day. Even the weekly magazine that chronicled the dramatic highs and lows of the Internet economy, the Industry Standard, closed its doors for good at the end of September. And morbid-sounding Web sites have sprouted up, such as Ghostsites, www.disobey.com/ghostsites, which features the The Museum of E-Failure that details the industry's demise by archiving the home pages of sites that have bit the market dust.

One of the more disturbing aspects of the demise, however, is the huge number of people who suddenly have found themselves out of work. By the beginning of the summer, 64,983 dot-com employees had been laid off in 2001--compared to 3,315 dot-com layoffs from January through May 2000. This is an increase of 58 percent from the 41,214 layoffs in all of last year, according to research reported by the Industry Standard.

CAPITALIZING ON THE DEMISE

Now that so much talent is back in the pool-of-consideration, can CPAs gather some into the fold and solve their hiring woes? Many California CPAs say that while it's still a challenge to find top candidates for senior positions, the dot-com demise has provided plenty of candidates for entry-level and junior management posts.

"Recruiters are looking at us much more actively as a place to fill spots," says CPA Joel Freedman, vice president of finance for San Francisco-based McKesson, the world's largest supply management and healthcare information technology company. "We also are seeing many more quality candidates coming through than we did before, which certainly is related to what is happening in the...